Deutschland 2008, 89 min.

The boy’s choir of the Regensburg Cathedral has been honing the art of liturgical song for more than a thousand years, and the ten year-old boys who belong to it are subjected to intensive training. A long way from their parents, they create a home for themselves at the boarding school, try to achieve recognition from their teachers and fellow pupils and battle the home sickness that is never far away. What unites them is their love of singing and their ambition to be a part of this famous concert choir that performs across the world and on the television.

For one year director Matti Bauer observed the young singers and the highs and lows of their lives as prospective members of the choir. The children in his film are not prodigies but boys on the cusp of puberty. Sometimes they’re little kids, sometimes they’re almost young men with bum-fluff who play Gameboy and are afraid of their voices breaking. Each personality comes with its own set of wishes, which through the course of the year, are repeatedly challenged. There’s Marco, who cries because he’s homesick and frequently considers giving up; Johannes, who isn’t bothered about striding ahead; Peter, who’s always in a good mood and for whom everything falls into place without much effort. And at the top of the class there’s Maxl, who regardless of his academic success at the end of the year, says: ‚You can’t feel perfect all the time. But you shouldn’t despair when you’re down. You just have to stick it out.’

And that is exactly what the young choir members in Matti Bauer’s film do. And they do it with a rare intensity. There is an intimate closeness in cameraman, Waldemar Hauschild’s images which follow the boys as they chase through the school’s hallways and dance for joy. The boys go after their goals with great strength and often unintentional humor. Audiences witnesses these efforts and the bewitching power of their singing, which if not always perfect, is constantly improving and reaches moving high points at concert choir performances. The simple, yet profound message of this film is that singing in the choir helps the boys to get over their various troubles. In an age in which we have thousands of songs on our MP3 players, but can’t sing a single one off by heart, this visual plea for singing is almost a provocation. The Domspatzen choirboys make us want to sing our hearts out. Even if not ‚Hallelujah’.

director: Matti Bauer
director of photography: Waldemar Hauschild
sound: Gregor Kuschel
editor: Gaby Kull-Neujahr BFS
commissioning editors: Sonja Scheider, Jochen Kölsch
Tangram Christian Bauer Filmproduktion